Clinical Analytics Platform TriNetX Raises $40M to Speed Drug Trials

TriNetX, a Cambridge, MA, developer of data analytics software for clinical research, has raised $40 million in a Series D funding round led by Merck’s corporate venture capital fund, the company said.

The company’s analytics platform helps pharma companies detail the many aspects of a clinical trial—from choosing hospital locations with adequate populations of patients to managing what age ranges and other demographic variables to include in the studies—to cut down on delayed studies due to a redesign or amendment.

Each change to a clinical trial plan can postpone a study for months. And the amendments don’t come cheap. A 2016 Tufts University study of 15 pharmaceutical companies and contract research organizations found a single “substantial amendment” of a Phase 2 trial plan cost $141,000 on average, while a similar change to a Phase 3 trial plan ran $535,000.

Pharma companies pay a subscription fee to access the analytics platform, which is fed by data from a variety of sources including insurance claims, tumor registries, genomic data, electronic health records, and unstructured written data from documents, such as patient discharge notes, according to TriNetX CEO Gadi Lachman.

“We are also linking those datasets together so you can see a full patient journey, everything known about a patient in the hospital setting, and tie it all together,” Lachman says.

Partner hospitals open up their anonymized electronic health records and other data to TriNetX in exchange for access to the platform for their own research and to get exposure to pharma companies seeking sites for clinical trials, he says.

The end goal for Lachman and TriNetX’s 110 employees is to reduce the speed bumps for pharma companies and get therapies to market faster.

“I have a big passion for saving lives on a massive scale,” Lachman says. “The vision here is to be the No. 1 preferred platform in the world, where researchers are just using it like they are using Microsoft Office.”

TriNetX says it has partners in 17 countries and counts nine of the top 15 pharmaceutical companies as customers, including Novartis (NYSE: NVS), Sanofi (NASDAQ: SNY), and Pfizer (NYSE: PFE) .

The investment by Merck (NYSE: MRK) and others will speed up the company’s global expansion into Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, and South America, and fund investments in machine learning to develop more insights for researchers from the company’s data, Lachman says.

The Series D brings TriNetX’s total funding to $102 million, the company said. Merck was joined in the round by new investors Mitsui (OTCMKTS: MITSY) and ITOCHU Technology Ventures (OTCMKTS: ITOCY) and existing investors MPM Capital, F2 Ventures, and Deerfield Management.

Brian Dowling is a Senior Editor at Xconomy, based in Boston. You can reach him at bdowling [at] xconomy.com. Follow @be_d